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12 Naive Realism and Hallucinations Matthew Nudds 1 All visual experiences present,1 or at least purport to present,2 mind-independent objects and their features and so seem to relate us to those objects and their features. Suppose, for example, that you are looking at a bowl of fruit on the table in front of you. You can visually attend to those mind-independent objects—the fruit and the bowl—and note their features: their color, their shape, the way they are illuminated, and so on. You can also introspectively reflect on the visual experience that you have while looking at the bowl of fruit. In doing so, you might notice features of your experience—that only parts of some of the fruit are visible from this perspective, for example, or that from this close the three-dimensional shape of the fruit is easily visible. Although in introspection you are interested in the character of your experience of the bowl of fruit, your attention is still on the objects of your experience: the fruit and the bowl. Since attending to your experience involves attending to the mind-independent objects of your experience, your experience seems such that were the bowl of fruit not actually there, you could not be having this particular experience. In general, when we introspect a visual experience, our experience seems in this way to involve the mind-independent objects or features that the experience presents, and so our experience seems to be a relational; it seems to have mind-independent objects and features as constituents.3 We can call the property of having some mindindependent object or feature as a constituent the naive realist property of experiences. It is fairly widely accepted that visual experiences seem to have the naive realist 1. In this chapter, whenever I talk about perceptual experiences, it is usually visual experiences that I have in mind. Although the arguments may generalize to the experiences associated with the other senses, it needs further argument to show that they do. 2. Since purporting to present something doesn’t imply failing to present it, in what follows I usually shorten “present or purport to present” to simply “purport to present.” 3. If experience entails the existence of its objects, then it is relational; if it seems to entail the existence of its objects, then it merely seems to be relational (see Crane, 2006). 272 M. Nudds property;4 naive realism is the view that some experiences—the veridical ones—actually do have it: it’s the view that veridical perceptual experiences have mind-independent objects and features as constituents.5 In a plausible conception of phenomenal character, the phenomenal character of a perceptual experience is those properties of the experience that explain the way it introspectively seems. We characterize the way an experience seems at least partly in terms of the objects and features it seems to involve. Naive realism is therefore the view that veridical perceptual experiences have a phenomenal character that consists of relations to mind-independent objects and features; it is the view that perceptual experiences have, as I shall say, a naive realist phenomenal character. We have two reasons for thinking that naive realism about visual experiences is true, both of which appeal to the naive realist phenomenal character of experiences. The first is straightforwardly phenomenological: the naive realist claims that the best explanation of the fact that visual experiences introspectively seem to have the naive realist property is that veridical experiences actually do have it: their having a naive realist property explains why they seem to have it. Those who reject naive realism claim that although experiences introspectively seem to have the naive realist property , their seeming that way is not explained by the fact that they actually do have it. Representationalists about perceptual experience, for example, explain the fact that experiences seem to involve mind-independent objects by appeal to the fact that experiences have contents that represent mind-independent objects. According to such views, visual experiences have a phenomenal character that does not consist of relations to mind-independent objects and features; they have what I call a non-naive realist phenomenal character. The second reason is epistemological but also appeals to the distinctive phenomenal character of veridical experiences. Visual experiences have epistemic authority over a subject’s beliefs in the following sense: in the absence of any countervailing or defeating reasons, it is rational to believe that things are as they are visually presented. Visual...

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